Yellow sticky notes of everything she’d organized, assessed or suggested over the past few months were scattered around the table: not just the dry agendas and to-do lists, but the details for every person who’d sat in her office or hunched on a plastic chair in the town hall, and poured out their frustration with partners, financial demands, fears for the future that they couldn’t share elsewhere. Each one with the same chorus: grief, for what had been lost. Her job – and she wasn’t sure she’d always managed to do it – was to convince these people that not everything had been lost. That there was still tomorrow and the day after, and that there were still things to smile about, seeds of hope to plant in the mud left behind.

Tara’s thousand words finished with one of those seeds of hope that had stayed with her for weeks: Jenson Hall’s birthday party.

Jenson and his family lived by the river on Dorstone Road. He’d only just come out of hospital after a bike accident that had left him with complex fractures and a programme of extensive rehab. The Halls had planned a treasure hunt party for his whole class – and, of course, everything for the afternoon was stored in their cellar.

Rosie Hall had come for help cleaning up the house, but broke down when Tara asked how the family was coping. Between the volunteers, they’d managed to throw the party, and in the end, it had been a bittersweet ray of sunshine in a gloomy time. Tara remembered Rosie’s hand squeezing hers so hard the bones nearly cracked.

You made everything go away for one afternoon, Tara, wrote Rosie on the other side of Jenson’s thank-you card. That was the best present.

Birthday parties were important to children, thought Tara, staring at what she’d written. You never forgot a birthday party that you didn’t get to go to, or a party cancelled because of measles or some grown-up ‘issue’ that was never properly explained.

Or a Swiss roll with candles hastily stuck in the top because someone forgot to collect your ballerina cake, and because someone else refused to go out and get another, on principle. You remembered something like that for years.

Tara stared at the screen and the words blurred.

‘You don’t have any plans for next Saturday?’ she repeated carefully. Not because she hadn’t been clear the first time, but to give Keith a chance to redeem himself.

The smell of toast and the sound of singing in the studio kitchen reassured Tara that she’d managed to sneak across the garden without being spotted by either Molly or Lloyd. She hovered on the doorstep, ostensibly to drop something off before she left for work.